We’re afraid of robots again. You can see our fear at the movie theater, in a film like “Ex Machina,” about a beautiful robot with humanoid intelligence who’s able to (surprise!) manipulate a computer geek into helping her escape from captivity.

The fear also powers the dystopian narratives of newspaper business sections, like this May 4 gem by Paul Vigna in the Wall Street Journal: “Think just of all the jobs that will be lost to self-driving trucks and taxis,” Vigna wrote, in “Bill Gross: What to Do After the Robots Take Our Jobs.”

So I’m not sure if it’ll make you feel better or worse to know that the robots are already here.

They’re at Stanford — of course — in the Stanford Shopping Center.

I was there recently, paying my annual tithe at the Apple Store. As I hustled past the Tesla showroom, keeping my head down so as not to make eye contact with any of the tourists snapping photos of the Model 3, I spotted a large white pod out of the corner of my eye.

It bleeped.

I froze in my tracks.

It was a robot. It was tall — nearly as tall as I am. It sat on three petite wheels. It had the inscrutable white opacity of a giant pearl, or a death mask.

And here’s the thing — even though the robot looked ’70s-futuristic, oversize and silly like the robots in the “Jetsons” TV cartoons, I could tell that the thing was determined to stand its ground.

I peered into its face and saw the blinking eye of a camera flash. Freaked out that the robot was beaming my image somewhere into the ether, I backed off.

The robot beeped and rolled away. Mission accomplished.

I called the mall’s management office. I was directed to an outside public relations firm, where I was told by account manager Jennifer Carroll that “the details of the patrol units are confidential and cannot be shared outside of law enforcement.”

“Really?” I said. “Because I didn’t even know these were for security. And you’re saying I can’t know what these big things are doing, following me around the mall, unless I’m a cop?”

Through the phone lines, Carroll must have felt my eyebrows standing at attention. She said she wasn’t trying to stonewall me. There are two “units” at the mall, Carroll said, and she would call the company, a Mountain View startup named Knightscope, and find out if they’d be willing to talk to me.

I put in my own phone call, and the next day I heard from Knightscope co-founder Stacy Stephens. Here’s what he said you should do the next time you find yourself being trailed by a robot.

Stop burglarizing that store: The robots aren’t cops, but they’re tattletales. “Think of them as advanced anomaly detection devices,” Stephens said. “There’s a ton of sensors on the robot, and they’re looking for anything out of the ordinary — changes in temperature, people who are present in a public space at an abnormal hour. They report that information back to a security detection center.”

“Blacklisted plates include criminal trespassers, people who are known threats, terminated employees and profiles like that,” he said. “The gray list has to do with people who are there at certain times of the day — UPS drivers, for example.”

But remember, the robot’s not a cop: When I told Stephens about our standoff, he laughed. “It’s OK to get close to the robot,” he said. “There are thousands of robot selfies on Instagram. I’ve seen people kissing them, posing their dogs with them. It can tell if someone’s trying to vandalize it. It reports that back. But engagement is fine.”

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That retro look? Totally on purpose: “We want to make sure the robots are very conspicuous when they’re on public property,” Stephens said. “If people are paying attention to them, it’s a natural deterrent to bad behavior. It’s the same thing as when a police car glides onto the freeway and everyone taps their brakes at the same time.”

The technology exists to make them smaller, but then they’d be easier to steal. Since people seem to fall in love with them — kissing them on Instagram? My word — it’s a real concern.

“We want to make sure no one’s lifting them up and taking them,” Stephens said.

I guess the robot wouldn’t be able to report that back to security fast enough, which brings me to my last point.

You may not have to fear for your job just yet. Your privacy is another matter: Stephens insists that robots are meant to augment, not replace, security guards — and I believe him, seeing as the robots aren’t capable of taking physically aggressive action.

But what they can do, which is to be yet another form of surveillance in our public spaces, may be dangerous enough. It’s another reminder that what we really have to fear from machines is the human thinking behind them.

Caille Millner is an editorial writer and Datebook columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. She has worked at the paper since 2006. On the editorial board, she covers a wide range of topics including business, finance, technology, education and local politics. For Datebook, she writes a weekly column on culture.She is the recipient of the Scripps-Howard Foundation’s Walker Stone Award in Editorial Writing and the Society of Professional Journalists’ Editorial Writing Award.